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After watching the trailer I had the strangest sense of déjà vu, it seemed as though the writer and director had gone and watched a bunch of thrillers and decided to mash them together. Finally when I went to see the film, I was taken back even further.

To begin with, I have not yet read the books, and so some of the concepts may be missing, but what was clear to me was that this film sounded an awful lot like Battle Royale but with a cast that looks like it came fresh out of a Gap advert.

The basic storyline’s are:

The Hunger Games:

A selection of boys and girls from different regions are chosen at random to fight to the death till one remain.

Battle Royale:

A classroom of students are chosen at random to fight to the death till one remain.

They do sound rather similar…

The concept of the teenagers fighting to the death made perfect (movie) sense although maybe not the best sense in the real world, and the forest setting instantly brought back the idea of a forest based hunt or be hunted situation, akin to Predator. (Just without Arnie, an alien and a mini-gun)

Regrettably the 12A rating got in the way of any decent fighting, and made the whole film about as violent as watching an episode of Country File. By removing the violence and fighting elements as well made the whole film a lot slower, as more time was spent waiting around, but without the directorial input to create suspense or fear for the character.

The main up point for the film was the well played part of Katniss Everdeen by Jennifer Lawrence, who seemed to realistically play the part of a common girl catapulted into a life and death situation, while at the same time being a 5 out of 5 for ‘Oh hello vicar!’

Yep, having a bow makes you awesome.

I would have to say the ending let it down the most. It seems with all the build up, once you win the games nothing much happens. It felt like it was all over in 5 minutes which could be summarised as ‘smile for the cameras’.

Overall Rating: 8 / 10

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Software Engineer. Tea Drinker.

To those that say you can not change the world with source code, I say you are not trying hard enough.

My name is Kevin Pfister, I am currently employed as a Software Engineer specializing in Embedded Solutions after finishing my Software Engineering degree at York. I was an Academic Developer Evanglist at Microsoft, World renowned author and a world-wide finalist in the Imagine Cup developer competition in both 2010 and 2011